No one who advocates for the mobile web wants to admit it, but it is true. Native is easier.

It’s easier to sell to stakeholders. Easier to monetize. And most importantly, easier to implement.

Argue about programming languages, memory management and reach all you want. There is one undeniable disadvantage that the mobile web faces that native apps don’t–over a decade of legacy code, cruft and entrenched organizational politics.

But the web is essential. Even companies whose businesses are centered on native apps need web pages to sell those apps. We can demonstrate time and again that a web-​​based approach is a smart investment.

So how do we sell mobile web projects? How do we work with the systems we currently have to build compelling mobile web experiences?

And most importantly, how should we be changing our web infrastructure, tools and workflow for the coming zombie apocalypse of devices.

Some of the most important design decisions happen in code. In 2009, I gave a talk at the Build conference in Belfast with what I thought was a fairly uncontroversial premise: web designers should write code. Since then, the subject has sparked more than a few debates, including a particular heated pile-on when Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted that he was "shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse." In a recent interview, Jonathan Ive said "It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it." He’s talking about product design, but the principle is just as relevant to the Web (if not more so). "The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form…. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned…. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way." As our industry grows and roles get more specialized, it’s possible to become a "web designer" without more than a cursory understanding of the fundamental building materials of the Web: the code. Is this just the price of progress? Are the days of the web craftsman soon to be in the past? Or is a hybrid approach to web design and development something worth preserve?

Scott’s in Mexico this week and he’s sitting down with Molly Holzschlag. Molly is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author and correctly works for Opera as an evangelist. She explains the history of HTML, SGML and XML and we chat about where we think the web is headed.

Bruce M. Hood is chair of the Cognitive Development Center in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. He was a research fellow at Cambridge and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and professor at Harvard. Hood has received many awards for his work in child development and cognitive neuroscience. His newest book is Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Bruce M. Hood explains how his agenda is different than the common skeptical agenda to disprove supernatural claims, and instead is an attempt to explain why people believe hold such beliefs in the first place. He argues that everyone is born with a "supersense," an instinct to believe in unseen forces and to recognize patterns and infer their causation, citing examples such as seeing Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich, or the case of the "haunted scrotum." He explains how this supersense is universal, and that even skeptics and rationalists often exhibit it in their lives through rituals and the owning certain valued possessions, such as Richard Dawkins’ prizing of objects once owned by Charles Darwin or MIT growing saplings from the tree under which Newton first discovered the laws of gravity. He details how rituals give a perceived sense of control to believers, and how they may actually affect a believer’s performance. He talks about the "secular supernatural," contrasting it with the "religious supernatural." He argues against Daniel Dennett’s and Richard Dawkins’s thesis that religious belief results primarily from indoctrination in childhood. And he defends the position that unbelievable beliefs serve important social functions.